zukalous

Intro I think there is a real hole in the Steam Marketplace for a different type of game that I found with Vampire Survivors. For years games have been moving up in quality and value. In this 2021 report more games are releasing in the $5 to $20 range. In Continue Reading

Your graduation, bat mitzvah, bar mitzvah, your wedding day, quinceañera, confirmation,  gastrulation – life is full of life milestones that mark the passage from one phase of life to the next.  The first milestone when you release a game on steam is when it earns it’s first 10 reviews.  I Continue Reading

Why even bother marketing if it comes down to going viral? Last week I wrote about how the game Laysara Summit Kingdom had a viral post on reddit that resulted in 11K wishlists. You can read the post here: While this bit of marketing was amazing, many fellow developers remarked Continue Reading

On December 29th, game programmer Maciek for Laysara: Summit Kingdom uploaded a 30 second clip of his game’s trailer onto Reddit’s r/gaming. Within 12 hours it had gone super viral and earned his game 3.2 Million Views, 73,000 upvotes, and over 11,000 wishlists in less than 24 hours. In today’s blog Continue Reading

I love when game developers write about what worked and what didn’t about marketing their game (commonly called a postmortem.) I don’t care about the size or the scope or the experience of the developer, if they write about their experience, I will read it. I reviewed a bunch of Continue Reading

For the most part, Twitter will NOT be a major source of wishlists for your game. (see footnote #1). It’s actually more valuable as a Business to Business tool among your fellow indies. It’s LinkedIn for cool-kids. It really is a great place to collaborate with other studios, find out Continue Reading

As you know, it is very important to launch your game’s “coming soon” Steam page at least 6 months (even better, 1 year) before your game’s launch so that you can slowly build interest and collect wishlists. When you launch your “coming soon” page you have an excuse to promote Continue Reading

Festival Planning Currently the number one way to get visibility and wishlists for your Steam game are online, virtual events (aka festivals) that Steam has given prominent featuring. They are the best way (and probably easiest) way to get your game seen by hundreds of thousands of potential buyers. In Continue Reading

This is an actual photo of my office and all of the gear that it takes to pull off this blog and my associated videos and talks. So I thought because today is CYBER MONDAY and the holiday season I would deconstruct what is in my office and what tools Continue Reading

Last week Valve Did 2 Q&As. One at DevGAMM (where I also gave a talk) and one at Indie X. Alden Kroll, Kaci Aitchison, and Tom Giardino all represented Valve this time. Here are the questions, their answers, and my commentary. This is not a direct transcription of their quotes Continue Reading